Eight years ago Paul Sinton-Hewitt had an idea of such shiny-foiled Easter-egg
perfection, that what was a time trial in Teddington is now something
life-changing.

Sinton-Hewitt was a good club runner with a knee injury. He was bored and wanted to stay involved with the running community, so on Oct 2, 2004, he organised for 13 friends to turn up at Bushy Park and timed them over a 5km course.

He came again the next week and the next and slowly the word spread and the number of runners turning up on a Saturday morning grew. Then, during 2007, the idea got wings and six more events started up — parkrun was born. By the end of 2009 there were 24, and last Saturday there were 124 involving 16,950 runners.

That is a lot of people up and moving who might have otherwise been making preliminary enquiries into their crème egg stash. But parkrun is about more than controlling the obesity epidemic, more than lowering blood pressure — it aims to break down the barriers to running while simultaneously encouraging community cohesion.

The brilliance, and success of the idea comes in its simplicity. So every Saturday, at 9am, (9.30 in Scotland) 52 weeks a year at over 100 locations around the country there are free, timed, 5km parkruns.

Once registered (easy and free on the website), you can turn up to any of these events, unannounced, and run. You need no number, no kit, no money. You can be an Olympian, or bring a dog, be in a wheelchair or push a pram, sprint, stagger or walk. And each week you are timed, and each week you are invited, but not coerced, back to a local coffee shop for a drink and a chat.

parkrun is built around its volunteers as there are only seven full-time paid members of staff. Last year 11,000 people volunteered 50,000 times, and each runner is asked to volunteer in some capacity three times a year. The idea is that an individual parkrun is organised by the local community for the local community. Parkrun itself is a not-for-profit organisation with no shareholders.

Tom Williams is the UK country manager. He used to be a lecturer in sports science at the University of Leeds and started the Leeds Parkrun (the first outside London) in Oct 2007. He and his fiancée ran on the morning of their wedding.

“Parkrun is born out of wanting to do something good — for some that will mean losing a couple of kilos, for others it will be being fitter than they ever were. And clearly there is a huge amount of good that comes from being physically active in a community way — it beats depression and combats loneliness,” he said.

“When I set up parkrun Leeds, Paul said to me that one of the conditions was that there was a designated coffee shop that we could all go to afterwards. The social side is very engineered and intentional.”

Hand in hand with the run is the website, which channels the inner nerd with great success. There are tables of race winners, tables of age-group winners, and an age-grade percentage, updated after each race.

I know it is dangerously addictive because I’ve seen my brother, uncle, dad, and sisters-in-law slip towards full-time obsession as they strain to trim seconds off their personal bests. On Easter Saturday my brother dragged us to the Guildford run — he won and, in a not-that-pleasing symmetry, I was last, but the stewards were still smiling as my daughter, niece and I crossed the line more than 10 minutes after everyone else. It gets to you: a combination of humiliation, curiosity and vanity that makes you think that perhaps you ought to have another go.

The mission statement is that there should be a parkrun everywhere in the world that people want one. And people do — already there are runs in Denmark, Australia and Camp Bastion in Afghanistan.

Next month it launches in New Zealand and America.

Turning a solitary pursuit into a force for good in the community is the sort of legacy the Olympics would weep for. Tom Williams remembers speaking to a parkrunner in his late fifties. “He said to me that before parkrun he’d always thought that no one would be at his funeral, but now he knows lots of people will come.”